5 Lawyer Advertising Mistakes to Avoid

© 2009, Brandon Cornett.

It's time for another lesson in lawyer marketing, courtesy of the Web Smart Lawyer. Here is today's lesson:

Do you use print, TV or radio advertising as part of your lawyer marketing program? If so, you’re probably paying quite a chunk of change for the exposure. It’s okay to make such an investment, if it works for you. But in many cases, lawyer advertising doesn’t work well enough to justify the expense. There are five common reasons for this.

Are You Making These Advertising Mistakes?

In truth, there are literally hundreds of ways to botch an advertisement. But I’m not writing a book here — just an article. So I’m going to focus on five of the most common mistakes with lawyer advertising campaigns.

1. Forgetting to Do Your Research

Many people spend too much money for advertising simply because they haven’t done enough research. Before I started my own consulting business, I was the advertising manager for a major printing company. I had an assistant whose job it was to research advertising options, pricing, markets exposure, etc. It was a full-time job for her. That’s how important it is to research an ad market before you plunge into it. I don’t expect you to hire somebody for this process — and you probably don’t need to, unless you’ve got a huge marketing budget. You can handle the process yourself.

Here are some of the things you should research before spending money on your lawyer advertising program. First, you should look into all of the options available to you. If you’re considering a newspaper ad, for example, you should find out about all of the pricing and display options. You should also research the market / readership / viewership for the channel you’re considering. If you use TV advertising, you’ll want to know as much about the network’s viewer demographics as possible.

I also recommend that you seek affordable options to advertise your business locally. This can be a great way to promote your services without spending a lot of money. For example, here’s a website in Austin that offers online advertising for only $9 per month. You can’t beat the price, and it might be a great opportunity for lawyers in that town. You have to do your research to find promotional channels like this.

Sure, it’s a learning process. You might not be familiar with the advertising process and terminology, so you’ll have to do some preliminary homework before you can even research your options. But you need to research every aspect of your lawyer advertising before you spend money on it. Otherwise, you could be wasting your time and money.

2. Failing to Distinguishing Your Ads

Here’s how some lawyers create their ads. They find out what their competitors are doing, and then they repeat that strategy. In other words, they simply plug their own name, photo and phone number into someone else’s advertising strategy. This is the absolute worse thing you can do, because it virtually eliminates your chances of setting yourself apart.

Marketing expert Seth Godin uses the analogy of brown cows and purple cows. If you drive through a cow pasture, you hardly notice the brown cows after a while. They all look exactly alike, so they become invisible after a while. But what if there was a purple cow in the same field? You would certainly notice that, wouldn’t you?

3. Not Hiring a Advertising Professional

I have seen some hideous lawyer ads over the years. You can spot them a mile away, because they are sloppy, poorly written, badly designed, etc. This is what happens when somebody with no advertising experience tries to create an ad for a professional publication. If you’re not familiar with the world of print publications (or TV advertising, or Internet ads), then find somebody who else. These people can help you with some of the other items on this list too, such as the research phase.

4. Repeating Failures Over and Over

The person running your ads (whether it’s a magazine, a TV network, or a direct mail printer) makes money from the number of advertisements you run. But they do not make money based on the success of those ads. This is a key point to remember, especially if your ads are not delivering the desired result. They will sell you on the idea of repetition, and how important it is to repeat your ads over a long period of time. It’s in their best interest if you keep running your ads, but it may not be in your best interest — not if the advertisements are failing.

Repetition is a good thing, but you should never repeat a marketing strategy that fails on the first go round. You should adjust the strategy until it produces results, and you should continue to “tweak” it to get even better results. Repeating a failed advertising campaign will only cost you money — it won’t help you grow your business.

5. Failing to Measure the Results

How do you know if your lawyer advertising program is working? By tracking the results, that’s how. The problem is that many people forget to track their marketing. And when this happens, you have no way to measure your marketing ROI (return on investment).

Here’s an example of what I mean. If you are paying a lot of money on newspaper or magazine ads, you need to know how well they are working. You can do this in several ways. Some people will set up a special URL / website address, and use it within the advertisement. That way, you know that the visitors to that special web page were sent from the magazine ad.

There are many ways to track your lawyer advertising results, and entire books have been written on the subject. How you track your success will depend on the types of advertising you use. The important thing is that you’re something to measure success and ROI.